Polish Studies of Kyiv: works of International scientific conference, Kyiv, 23-25 of May, 2018. / chief editor R. Radyshevskyi. – vol. XXXV. – Kyiv: Talkom, 2019. – P. 402-411.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17721/psk.2019.35.402-411

Shalata-Barna I.

NATIONAL AND POLITICAL MAXIMAS OF TODOS OSMACHKA’S PROSE IN A CONTEXT OF HIS SPIRITUAL SEARCH

Abstract. The article’s objective is to illustrate the need for a deeper analysis and interpretation of Todos Osmachka’s epic of the 40s and 50s of the XX century as a text in which national world-view constants accumulate. A sharp ideological and political confrontation with the aggression of Moscow, presented in the text of the Osmachka as a diachronic imprint of the national history of the Soviet-Stalinist regime, reveals the essence of the patriot-artist. The existence of the Ukrainian man, as well as the nation in general, is the only one possible within the framework of God’s world, subject to the observance of the canonical and Christian virtues and, foremost, in an active national patriotic position.

The linguistic, ideologically political textual and context reading of Todos Osmachka’s artistic prose clearly manifests the genesis of the Ukrainian mentality of the author himself.

For Todos Osmachka, Ukraine was the basis of all of his work, the imperative and the fundamental concentration of all creative and ideologically political meanings. Actually, the core of the national entity existence is the creative essence of Osmatchka’s prose.

In the person of Todos Osmachka – the poet, prose writer, translator, philosopher – there can be seen one of those infrequent cases when, unlike western existentialists, the aesthetic-philosophical concept was not only of a frame of mind declaration kind, and manifested but at the level of author’s prosaic and poetic texts, but it also found an uncompromising and consecutive embodiment in his personal life.

After the existential moduses in Osmachka’s prose have been allocated and interpreted, there frequently arises the already noticed in the literature study thought an essential issue of distinction between the specificity of the western (European) existentialism, that concentrates on the existential problems of a separate, often denationalized, individual, and the Ukrainian existentialism, which manifests itself at the “outlook-mental” level and displays a specific “existential- boundary” world view of the Ukrainian, considering and explicating the existential problems of a person first of all through the national ontology prism.An attempt at positioning the author as a Christological writer, for whom Christianity as a measurement of spirituality was one of the priority concepts of a national-ideological position.

Keywords: the existence of the Ukrainian man, national-patriotic position, the Christological context of prose, ideological and political accents.

Information about author: Shalata-Barna Iryna, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Ukrainian Literature and Theory of Literature Drohobych Ivan Franko State Pedagogical University.